Chasing the stink at City View School over holidays

WORCESTER — The holidays bring to mind the scent of pine trees and baked goods, but it's sewer gas that will monopolize Christmas break at City View School on Prospect Street.

The school, which serves close to 600 students, has had an intermittent problem with sewer smells since at least last year.

Last week , the School Department thought it had fixed the problem when a contractor repositioned a sewer pipe under the parking lot, said James M. Bedard, Worcester public schools' director of facilities management.

But when staff showed up Friday, parts of the school still stunk. Some teachers didn't want to go inside, he said. The Fire Department showed up shortly before 8 a.m. and checked the natural gas and hydrogen sulfide levels and found no problems, and school continued.

The smell is "more of a nuisance than anything else," according to Deputy Fire Chief Geoffrey Gardell.

The smell seems to come from the hall, not classrooms, said Leonard A. Zalauskas, president of the Educational Association of Worcester.

About six months ago, the School Department did a smoke test that showed some leaking seals and the fact that the sewer drain line was too high. But it has been hard to pin down the source of the smell, which can disappear for months, Mr. Bedard said. He likened it to "chasing a ghost through the building."

Workers will spend the holiday break re-sealing toilets and fixing other possible sources of air leaks, Mr. Bedard said.

"I'm having the guys pull all the toilets now" and replace the wax seal between the floor and the toilet, he said. That seal is below the trap in each toilet that uses water to block sewer gases from coming into a bathroom.

"We were up there both days over the weekend, and we have a whole team up there today," Mr. Bedard said Monday. "We're going to continue to work on it the entire (holiday) shutdown."

EAW Executive Secretary Brad Brousseau met with staff at the school this month, Mr. Zalauskas said. The problem is not that the School Department and city haven't tried to address the problem; it's that they haven't been successful yet, Mr. Zalauskas sad.

"If they weren't doing anything, I'd be yelling," he said. "They're trying to figure it out."

The sewer smells are unrelated to the radon removal system that sucks radon out from under the school and pipes it to the roof for release, Mr. Bedard said. However, that system creates a negative pressure in the building, meaning, "It's going to pull smells from everywhere," he noted.

He did not know how much it would cost to keep the sewer smells out of the building.